In recent years, progress has been made toward digitalization and realization of greater functionality of various electrical home appliances such as refrigerators, microwave ovens, washing machines, weight scales, and body fat scales. In accordance with the digitalization and the realization of greater functionality of such electric appliances, attempts are being made to accumulate various kinds of data in an electric appliance, read such data from the electric appliance to outside of the apparatus by wireless communication, and utilize the data to monitor information and provide new services.
As a technique for reading data stored in an apparatus to the outside as described above, a technique is known for reading data stored in a storage unit of a wireless card from a read device by wireless communication by specifying an address of the storage unit and a data length (for example, refer to Patent Document 1).
However, when reading data from various electrical home appliances such as refrigerators, microwave ovens, washing machines, weight scales, and body fat scales, there is a difference in the types and amounts of data that is respectively stored by such appliances. For example, a refrigerator stores internal temperature and the amount of stored data is small. On the other hand, since a body fat scale stores, for example, data related to a body fat ratio that is measured by a user on a daily basis over a long period of time, the amount of stored data is large. In addition, due to circumstances related to the design of each electric appliance, an address where data is stored may differ for each apparatus model.
As described above, unlike cases where specifications have been standardized and a data storage address and a data length are unified such as the case of the wireless card described in the Patent Document, with electric appliances which are available in a large number of types and models such as electrical home appliances, an address where data is stored and the amount of the data differ for each electric appliance. Therefore, there is an inconvenience that reading data stored in such an electric appliance to the outside by specifying an address is difficult.    Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H6-187519